Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Poverty Justice and Human Capabilities (Diana Strassmann)/Review an existing wikipedia page

Assignment: Wikipedia Page Review
Due Date: In hard copy either in class Thursday, Jan. 31 or to HUMA Room 106 by 4PM Friday, Feb. 1

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." -Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia

The typical Wikipedia editor has been described as “a college degree [educated], 30-years-old [male], [who] is computer savvy but not necessarily a programmer…and lives in the US or Europe.”  As a consequence, certain topics (Star Trek, for example) are much more thoroughly represented on Wikipedia than others. In particular, topics related to gender, race, class, development, poverty and sociology are grossly underrepresented on the site. Through the Wikipedia assignment, you will actively contribute to improving the representation of these topics on a publically accessible and widely used source that more than 400 million people reference per month. With this assignment, you will learn and practice how to evaluate existing Wikipedia articles.

First, read the following items from the Wikipedia resources handed out in class:
 * “Life of an Article” (p. 10) and “What Makes a Quality Article?” (pp. 12-13) from the Blue introductory booklet ~ also available online at: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Welcome_to_Wikipedia_brochure_EN.pdf
 * Evaluating Article Quality (green cover) booklet ~ also available online at: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Evaluating_Wikipedia_article_quality_2010-11-26_(web).pdf
 * “Contributing to Wikipedia: Overall Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria” handout (contains links to more information and guidelines)


 * 1) Choose one course topic and one STEM/Popular Culture/Video gaming topic. List these topics on the evaluation sheet below.
 * 2) Quickly read through your STEM/Popular Culture/Video gaming topic page.  Reflect on the quality of the article, the type of information included, organization and readability. Use the sheet below to prompt your thoughts and fill in the chart.
 * 3) Quickly read through your course topic page. Get an overall sense of the page.  Reflect on the quality of the article, the type of information included, organization and readability.  Fill in the chart below. Consider in comparison with a Wikipedia Featured Article written by a Rice student on the American White Ibis.
 * 4) List two areas where each page may most benefit from improvement.

Review of an existing wikipedia document by Diana Strassmann is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.